Friday, April 17, 2009

Raid Healing Idea

Right now, paladin healing is almost in a good place. The only issue is raid healing. I know that paladins are supposed to be weak at raid healing, but I think the current situation is excessive. Relying on Glyph of Holy Light is insane.

As well, Flash of Light is really weak. It's still highly efficient, but it just isn't powerful enough to handle current damage levels. Holy Light has pretty much become the weapon of choice these days.

Because I like trying to kill two birds with one stone, here's an idea to help both problems:

What if a paladin had a glyph or high-level talent such that casting a Flash of Light automatically cast a second Flash of Light on a injured target within 10 yards. Flash of Light would become more useful, we get a little taste of smart healing, our throughput when raid healing would increase, and we could hit more than one person at a time. I think it would still be weaker than the three other classes at raid healing, but it would close the gap some.

Here's my idea in Glyph form:

Glyph of Light's MercyMajor GlyphYour Flash of Light heals an additional friendly target within 10 yards. Increases the cost of Flash of Light by 100%.

So Flash of Light's cost doubles, but we can use it to raid heal somewhat effectively.

19 comments:

This is a decent idea, but the downside is too harsh given that the upside is situational at best. Perhaps a better idea is to have it as a cooldown that you can hit when you anticipate high raid damage.

You presumably want a "smart" heal, which the developers are wary of making too powerful. How would you feel if the proposed glyph only gave 50% healing to a nearby target, and 50% increased cost?

For comparison, Shamans have a deep Restoration talent that is similar, Ancestral Awakening. There are a few differences: it only triggers following a crit, doesn't cost anything extra, and heals for 30% of the original heal.

On my shaman, Ancestral Awakening hits for 2.5k-3k, it cannot crit, and it only fires if my original heal crits. Checking a fellow Paladin healer, I see his Flash of Light hits for 3.5k-4k, and crits up to 6k. If you copied 100% of his FoL onto a nearby target, you'd have a very powerful spell.

Too powerful? I don't know. But I wonder if a 50% cost increase and a 50% smart heal would still help you out.

And that is the exact problem right now with the holy paladin...the need to balance PvP is making our PvE experience very tough. It really frustrates me that I have so much trouble healing an encounter such as Maly when another class, who is many times undergeared compared to me can do it with seemingly ease. I rolled my paladin for the specific purpose of being a healer, and with each patch I'm finding my self more and more wishing that I'd rolled a priest or druid.

They keep "balancing" encounters so that the druids and priests have a niche in which a paladin finds it near impossible to heal, so how about they do the same for us?....an encounter in which a paladin is required or at least preferred would be nice. Something along the lines where only a string of holy light crits will be able to heal it.

Thats exactly the reason i quit WoW. I love healing but compared to other classes Pala's have to work harder to achieve what other classes can do while slacking. I cba to lvl another healer so after almost 5 years i cancelled my subscription some time ago.

I think something _along these lines_ is a great idea. The Glyph of Holy Light shows that we can at least be _allowed_ to multi-target heal, albeit in a kinda gibbed manner. An equivalent for flash heals should certainly be worthy of consideration.

Totally agree with the whole PvP issue though. We almost need some kind of "will not work when flagged for PvP" disclaimer on some spells.

Oh, and of course now that Ulduar is around, I agree that Flash Heal is about as effective as bailing out a boat with a thimble. Blizz have been commenting about wanting to make Pally healing more interesting and enjoyable, a change here would be a step in the right direction and possibly help bring Flash back to some kind of usefulness.

Blizz has already showed they dont balance the PVE game around PVP. they let Holy Paladins absolutely DOMINATE the ranks for an entire season and Druid healers for 2+ seasons before that. giving us a smart heal in that type of environment ontop of our other pvp friendly attributes would make this worse. But the current state of holy PVE as a one trick holy light spamming pony is no bueno. Dont get me wrong i love 16k HL crits but with the amount of AOE damage that gets thrown around i am pretty much considered a MT healer and thats it.

Honestly, with a generous use of Holy Shock, instant Flash of Lights and a Holy Light now and then...and a focus on stacking Spell Power and Crit instead of Int and Haste, a Holy Paladin can raid heal with no problem, especially if you use the seal of light glyph, the flash of light glyph and maybe even the Holy Shock glyph. It you have 5/5 Divinity it makes it easier. Non-tanks don't really have all that much health anyway so a couple flash of lights will usually do it to top them off. I personally have no problem raid healing as a paladin at all.

Personally, I'd say the solution is to essentially 'swap' the two Glyphs. Have Glyph of Holy Light increase critical, while Glyph of Flash Heal heals multiple targets (albeit at a higher percentage than the current Glyph of Holy Light).

When we were doing XT002-Deconstructor last night, FoL didn't have any problems healing the aoe. Let's put the situation this way: The Deconstructor's aoe does 120% of a player's health as damage over 12 seconds. That means a player has to get a heal for at least 20% health in the course of 9 seconds to keep from dying. Let's say that, fully raid buffed, an average dps has about 20k hp, when geared in top Naxx gear. When fully raid buffed, my FoL also lands for about 4k. , right at the 20% mark. That means that in 9 seconds, I can heal about 6-7 dps without the fear of dying, more or less depending on lag. That doesn't even include Holy Shock, Beacon of Light or Sacred Shield. Even if it's 5 dps you can save in the 9 sec by just casting FoL, that means you have a chance to save two more passively. So 7/25 people healed by one pally isn't bad, especially because most raids carry at least 6 healers.

Having only see the first 4 bosses in Ulduar, I can't verify the whole story but there are a few things that really stand out.

1. Flash of light has almost no use any more. Celton's comment actually works more against his case than for it. If it takes 2 flashes to top up a melee (and it does) you are looking at 15 seconds to hit a 5 person melee group. That same healing can be done by a shammy in 5. The problem is that the Ulduar encounters are tuned to that 5 sec healing - Naxx was not. There wasn't a lot of raid wide damage in Naxx like there seems to be in Ulduar.

2. The encounters in Ulduar almost seemed to be designed to limit the power of pally healing. Its fight after fight with constant movement and raid wide damage (not to mention mechanics that gimp regen). Massive amounts of tank damage limits the ability of a pally healer to keep a stream of beacon heals on the tank. A lot of fights force people to stay 10 yards or so apart - which limits the effectiveness of GoHL. I noticed that the effectiveness of GoHL halved in Ulduar compared to Naxx.

Now I am not sure if the flash of light idea works but something has to be done with it - at the moment the only "competitive" method of pve healing is to take int and crit from ele shammy gear and holy light bomb the tank. A 4k flash of light on a single target just won't cut it, not when the bosses are hitting for 20.

I'm not sure I'd use this combo but it is a valid point.I wouldn't go as far as saying FoL is completely useless in raids,there is no way you could keep up mana on healing for General Vezax if you just cut out the FoL from your rotation.The spell will always have a part in raid rotation,and the recent change in glyphs for +crit to Flash of Light will prolong it's use even further.

If you think paladins are fine as they are healing tanks and just want to make flash of light a bit more interesting, then yes, a glyph is a great idea :)

If, on the other hand, you think the class's raid healing capability is fundamentally too weak, I'd argue against a glyph solution.

I personally think it is not enough to address any deep-seated issues with a glyph. This is not what glyphs were supposed to be for, and it's a crutch that Blizzard is falling back on far too easily (I speak from personal resentment). Can't deal intelligently with something? Chuck a glyph at it.

I don't know how important raid healing is to paladins. From what I've read and seen, even paladins have varying opinions. But I'd say every class should be equipped for every healing situation - even if they are not the best at it - and as an outsider I'd say paladins do not have the tools for the job.

You can handle it through talents, but looking at the range of tools available to the other healing classes, I'd say there's plenty of room to add spells baseline. It's a shame that the other classes have already grabbed the most interesting mechanics, and that might make it difficult to find something unique for paladins. I'd have thought the design of prayer of mending would have suited paladins very well, for starters, but I'm sure the class designers could come up with something if motivated to do so. Talents could be set up to force specialisation in one area or another, much like the current feral druid tree.

All of this depends on how much of an issue you think raid healing is, or should be.

Hmm...I suggest these posters tell their raid leader to recruit a second healer. It is incredibly difficult to solo-heal Ulduar as a Paladin.

/sarcasm

People only get fed up with their Paladin healer when they try to do something the class isn't designed for. Would you try to dps as holy? Raid tank? Then why would you try to be a raid healer? In my experience, I provide a few vital benefits to my raid group:

1) I can staunche the bleed long enough for raid heals to do their job. Someone just got fireballed by Razorscale with another on the way? Holy Shock gives my druid enough time to get off the Regrowth or the HoTs can tic them back up to full.

2) I can bomb heals for extended periods of time. This is cruicial while learning content. Before the dps knows where all the fires are, before the OT knows how to pick up all the adds efficiently, before we have the gear to make it easy, I bomb 15k heals into the tank without breaking too much of a sweat. I can't go on forever, but I can buy the raid time recover from some critical mistakes.

3) I free up the other healers from having to worry about the tank. They are better at keeping the raid alive. It's just the way things are. I'm better at keeping that tank up. If they can rest assured that I'll have the heal landing on the tank in less than a second, they can stop worrying about his health dropping and worry about patching up the raid damage. Dps dies when the healers all switch to the tank (or they are being stupid). I give my raid healers the peace-of-mind to do their job.

Blizzard has an idea of what the role of the Holy Paladin entails. We may not fully understand it, and the WoW designers may not have perfected it. Each patch teaches us about their intended role. Players gripe about Holy Paladins, because they want to use them for things they aren't intended for. The Holy Paladin is meant to play the role of "savior". Our big heals show they are meant for players who are most in need of health. Holy Paladins also have several spells where they sacrifice themselves by transferring damage from other party members to themselves, and commanding enemies to stop attacking party members and instead attack themselves. The most effective role of the Holy Paladin is to keep the main tanks and off tanks alive long enough for the dps to burn down the boss. That being said, Beacon of Light shows that Holy Paladins are also intended to heal other party members as well as the tank. Holy Paladins also play the "topping off" role where they overheal a single player who is sustaining damage. Most likely the tank. The Holy Paladin's roll also includes placing protective shields on players to absorb damage, removing poisons and diseases, reducing the duration of curse and silence effects, and giving players buffs and auras to protect and enhance their own abilities. We are intended to be durable, powerful healers, but we have our own weaknesses. There are classes better suited to heal a large party of players. We have our role, and other people have theirs.